The Indianapolis Demon House

In a small rental house on Carolina Street in Gary, Indiana, something happened between 2011 and 2012 that defied the explanations of everyone who encountered it — including people whose professional training and institutional authority should have made them the last to entertain the possibility of the supernatural. A mother named Latoya Ammons and her three children reported phenomena that began with the conventional vocabulary of haunting — footsteps, shadows, strange sounds in the night — and escalated into something so extreme that it drew the involvement of police officers, hospital personnel, social workers, and clergy, many of whom witnessed events they could not explain and were willing to say so on the record. A child reportedly walked backward up a wall and flipped over the ceiling. Another spoke in a voice that was not his own. Medical professionals documented incidents they explicitly stated had no natural explanation. A police captain who entered the investigation as a skeptic left it as a believer. The Gary, Indiana demon house case is remarkable not because of the family’s claims, which echo countless other accounts of alleged demonic activity, but because of who corroborated those claims — trained professionals, institutional officials, and sworn officers of the law who had nothing to gain and much to lose by attesting to the impossible.

The House on Carolina Street

The house itself was unremarkable — a modest, single-story rental in a working-class neighborhood of Gary, a once-prosperous steel city that had fallen on hard times. Gary in 2011 was a community marked by economic decline, population loss, and the attendant social difficulties that accompany deindustrialization. The Carolina Street house was neither grand nor derelict, simply an ordinary dwelling in an ordinary neighborhood, the kind of place that attracts no attention and generates no legends.

Latoya Ammons moved into the house with her mother, Rosa Campbell, and her three children — a twelve-year-old daughter and two sons, ages nine and seven — in November 2011. The family had no particular reason to expect anything unusual about the property. It was affordable, available, and adequate for their needs. They unpacked their belongings, arranged their furniture, and began their lives in what they expected to be an unremarkable new home.

The first signs of trouble appeared within weeks of their arrival. Ammons and Campbell reported hearing footsteps in the basement when no one was down there. Large black flies appeared in the house despite the winter weather, clustering on the screened-in porch in numbers that seemed inconsistent with the season. Shadows moved in peripheral vision but vanished when looked at directly. Doors opened and closed by themselves. These phenomena, while unsettling, were not unlike the experiences reported in many alleged haunting cases, and the family initially attempted to manage their discomfort through prayer and the practical adjustments that people make when they suspect something is wrong with their home but are not yet ready to name what it might be.

The Escalation

The situation deteriorated rapidly in early 2012. The phenomena intensified from subtle disturbances to events that were impossible to ignore or rationalize. The children began exhibiting behavior that frightened the adults in the household — episodes that Ammons and Campbell described as possession.

The twelve-year-old daughter was reportedly levitated from her bed, hovering above the mattress in a manner that neither her mother nor grandmother could explain. The boys developed behavioral disturbances that went beyond normal childhood acting out — speaking in voices that were not recognizably their own, displaying physical strength inconsistent with their size and age, and entering trance-like states from which they could not be easily roused.

Campbell reported encountering a shadowy figure in the living room — a dark, hooded shape that she described as standing near the children’s bedroom door. On another occasion, she reported being awakened by the sound of heavy footsteps climbing the basement stairs, followed by the basement door swinging open despite being secured. Wet footprints appeared on the floor, leading from the basement to the living room, though no one had been in the basement and there was no water source to account for them.

The family sought help from their church. They called clairvoyants and spiritual advisors. They attempted to cleanse the house through prayer. Nothing worked. The activity continued to escalate, and the children’s episodes became more frequent and more disturbing.

The Authorities Become Involved

The case took an extraordinary turn when the Department of Child Services became involved. A report was made regarding the welfare of the children — the circumstances of the referral are not entirely clear, but the involvement of DCS transformed the case from a private family matter into an officially documented event.

On April 19, 2012, DCS family case manager Valerie Washington visited the Ammons home to conduct an assessment. What she witnessed during that visit would become the most widely cited and most difficult-to-dismiss element of the entire case. According to Washington’s official report — a government document filed as part of a child welfare investigation, not a paranormal account — she observed one of the boys being held by his grandmother when he began growling. His eyes rolled back in his head. Then, while Washington watched, the boy walked backward up a wall, from the floor to the ceiling, and flipped over, landing on his feet.

Washington’s account was documented in her official case report and later confirmed in media interviews. She was not alone in witnessing the event — a nurse from the family’s medical team was also present and corroborated the account. Both women stated unequivocally that they had seen the child walk up the wall and that they could not explain what they had witnessed.

The significance of this testimony cannot be overstated. Washington was a trained social worker conducting an official investigation. Her report was a government document subject to professional scrutiny. She had no motive to fabricate or embellish — indeed, claiming to have witnessed a child walking up a wall would more likely damage her professional credibility than enhance it. Yet she reported what she saw, and she stood by her account.

The Hospital

The children were taken to Methodist Hospital in Gary for evaluation. The medical staff who examined and observed the children during their stay documented events that they, too, found inexplicable.

According to hospital records and staff interviews, one of the boys began speaking in a deep, gravelly voice that was markedly different from his normal speech. The voice used language and references that seemed inconsistent with the child’s age and education. Medical staff who witnessed the episode found it deeply disturbing and could not attribute it to any known medical condition.

Reports from the hospital also describe one of the children levitating — rising from a surface without any apparent physical mechanism. While levitation claims are among the most extreme and difficult to credit in the paranormal literature, the fact that this particular claim was reported by medical professionals in a hospital setting, documented in medical records, and witnessed by multiple staff members gives it an unusual degree of institutional credibility.

The medical team conducted thorough physical and psychological examinations of the children but could not identify any medical condition that would account for the behaviors they had observed. The children were not found to be suffering from seizure disorders, psychiatric conditions, or any other diagnosable illness that might explain the episodes. The hospital’s assessment, while not endorsing a supernatural explanation, explicitly stated that the observed phenomena could not be attributed to natural medical causes.

Captain Charles Austin

Perhaps no individual’s involvement in the case has been more significant in establishing its credibility than that of Gary Police Captain Charles Austin. Austin was assigned to investigate the family’s claims as part of the broader official response to the situation. He entered the case as a self-described skeptic — a career law enforcement officer with no particular interest in or inclination toward the paranormal.

Austin’s investigation included visits to the Carolina Street house, interviews with the family and with the various professionals who had witnessed anomalous events, and his own direct observations. Over the course of his involvement, Austin’s skepticism eroded. He reported experiencing phenomena in the house that he could not explain — his audio recorder capturing strange sounds, photographs showing anomalous images, and a pervasive atmosphere that he found deeply unsettling.

In one widely reported incident, Austin took photographs inside the house that appeared to show a shadowy figure in a window — a figure that was not visible to the naked eye at the time the photograph was taken. Austin submitted the images for analysis and could not identify any conventional explanation for the anomaly.

Austin’s transformation from skeptic to believer was gradual and reluctant. He was aware that his statements could damage his professional reputation, and he did not make them lightly. In interviews, he described a process of accumulating evidence that eventually overwhelmed his initial dismissiveness — not a single dramatic conversion but a steady accretion of inexplicable observations that left him unable to maintain his original position.

“I am a believer,” Austin stated in a widely reported interview. He acknowledged that the admission was professionally risky but maintained that intellectual honesty required him to report what he had observed, regardless of the consequences.

The Exorcisms

The family sought spiritual intervention through their connections with the Catholic Church. Father Michael Maginot, a priest at St. Stephen Martyr Parish in Merrillville, Indiana, became involved with the case and eventually performed a series of exorcisms on the Ammons family members.

Maginot was initially cautious, approaching the case with the skepticism that the Catholic Church institutionally brings to claims of demonic activity. The Church maintains rigorous criteria for authorizing exorcisms, requiring that natural explanations be exhausted before supernatural ones are considered. Maginot conducted his own investigation, interviewed the family and the officials who had witnessed phenomena, and reviewed the documentary evidence before concluding that the case warranted spiritual intervention.

The exorcisms were conducted over a period of several months. Maginot reported experiencing resistance during the rituals — the subjects exhibiting violent reactions, speaking in unfamiliar voices, displaying physical symptoms inconsistent with their normal behavior. He performed multiple sessions before concluding that the demonic influence had been addressed.

Following the exorcisms and the family’s departure from the Carolina Street house, the phenomena reportedly ceased. The children’s behavior returned to normal. The family reestablished their lives in a different location without further incident. The resolution appeared to be complete and lasting.

Zak Bagans and the Demolition

The Carolina Street house attracted the attention of Zak Bagans, the host and executive producer of the television program “Ghost Adventures.” Bagans purchased the property in 2014 with the stated intention of investigating the phenomena and filming a documentary about his experiences.

Bagans and his crew spent time in the house conducting investigations and filming. Bagans reported experiencing a range of disturbing phenomena during his time in the property, including physical symptoms, psychological disturbances, and events that he attributed to the continuing presence of whatever had afflicted the Ammons family. He described the house as the most disturbing location he had ever investigated, a claim that carried some weight given his extensive experience with allegedly haunted properties.

In January 2016, Bagans had the house demolished, stating that it was too dangerous to leave standing and that no one should live in it. The demolition was controversial — some researchers argued that destroying the site eliminated the possibility of further investigation, while others questioned whether Bagans’s decision was motivated more by promotional considerations than by genuine concern.

The resulting documentary, “Demon House,” was released in 2018 and provided Bagans’s account of his experiences at the property. The film included interviews with members of the Ammons family, with officials who had been involved in the case, and with other individuals who had experienced phenomena at the house.

The Weight of Official Testimony

The Gary demon house case occupies an unusual position in the literature of paranormal investigation. Claims of demonic possession and poltergeist activity are common enough to constitute a recognizable genre, and most such claims rest entirely on the testimony of the affected family — testimony that, however sincere, is inherently difficult to evaluate from the outside. What distinguishes the Carolina Street case is the breadth and institutional weight of the corroborating testimony.

A DCS case manager witnessed a child walking up a wall and documented it in an official report. Hospital staff observed and recorded inexplicable behavior in a medical setting. A police captain investigated the claims and concluded, against his initial inclination, that something genuinely anomalous had occurred. A Catholic priest, operating within a tradition that is institutionally skeptical of demonic claims, concluded that exorcism was warranted.

None of these individuals had any apparent motive to fabricate their accounts. Several had strong professional reasons to avoid making the statements they made. Their testimony was not coordinated — they arrived at their conclusions independently, through separate observations, at different times and in different contexts. The convergence of their accounts creates a pattern that is difficult to attribute to hoax, hysteria, or misperception.

Whether that convergence constitutes evidence of demonic activity, of an unknown psychological phenomenon affecting multiple witnesses, or of something else entirely remains a matter of interpretation. What it constitutes, at minimum, is a case that cannot be responsibly dismissed without engaging seriously with the testimony of the people who were there — people whose training, profession, and institutional authority gave them every reason to find a normal explanation and who could not.

The house on Carolina Street is gone now, reduced to an empty lot in a struggling Indiana city. The family has moved on. The officials have returned to their duties. But the questions the case raised — about the nature of the phenomena, about the credibility of institutional witnesses, about the boundaries of what we are willing to believe — persist. Something happened in that house that left trained professionals searching for words to describe what they had seen. Whatever it was, the empty lot where the house once stood offers no answers. It is simply a space where something inexplicable once occurred, marked by nothing but grass and silence and the reluctant testimony of those who were there.

Sources

• Wikipedia search: “The Indianapolis Demon House”
• Society for Psychical Research — SPR proceedings, peer-reviewed psychical research since 1882
• Library of Congress — American Folklife Center — American folklore archive